
If you have software packages which you wish to share with others or simply between your own personal machines, a neat and easy solution is to create your own YUM repository and provide your .repo file for download.
YUM is by far the easiest method of installing software on Red hat, Centos and Fedora. Not only does it mean you don't need to trawl the web looking for somewhere to download the packages, YUM does a great job of satisfying any package dependencies. As long as the required packages are available in the enabled repositories on your system, YUM will go out and get everything you need.
To create your own YUM repository, you will need to install the yum-utils and createrepo packages:
yum install yum-utils createrepo
yum-utils contains the tools you will need to manage your soon to be created repository, and createrepo is used to create the xml based rpm metadata you will require for your repository.
Once you have installed these required tools, create a directory in your chosen web server's document root e.g:
mkdir -p /var/www/html/repo/recital/updates
Copy the rpm's you wish to host into this newly created directory.
The next step is to create the xml based rpm metadata. To create this use the createrepo program we installed earlier.
At the shell type the following command:
createrepo -v -s md5 /var/www/html/repo/recital/updates
This will create the required metadata in the repodata directory of your /var/www/html/repo/recital/updates directory.
root@test repodata]# ls -l rwotal 44 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 28996 Jan 13 21:42 filelists.xml.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 284 Jan 13 21:42 other.xml.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1082 Jan 13 21:42 primary.xml.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 951 Jan 13 21:42 repomd.xml
To do a final consistency check on your repository run the following command:
verifytree /var/www/html/repo/recital/updates
We now have a fully functioning YUM repository for our hosted rpm packages.
The next process is to create a .repo file in the client systems /etc/yum.repos.d directory.
Navigate to the /etc/yum.repos.d directory on your system as root.
Using your preferred text editor to create the .repo file. In this example I will call it recital.repo.
Now paste in the following lines:
[Recital] name=Recital Update Server baseurl=http://ftp.recitalsoftware.com/repo/recital/updates enabled=1 gpgcheck=1
Once that is saved, at the shell prompt on the same machine (YUM client system).
$ yum repolist Loaded plugins: presto, refresh-packagekit repo id repo name status Recital Recital Update Server enabled: 1 adobe-linux-i386 Adobe Systems Incorporated enabled: 17 fedora Fedora 12 - i386 enabled: 15,366
As you can see the Recital repo is now being picked up and we have access to all the packages it is hosting.
See how easy that was!
The best way to learn Recital is to build some applications. The developers of Recital have written a book "Recital Essentials" which you can read here.
This guide will assist you in setting up an rsnapshot backup server on your network. rsnapshot uses rsync via ssh to perform unattended backups of multiple systems in your network. The guide can be found on the centos website here.
In this article Barry Mavin explains step by step how to setup a Linux HA (High Availability) cluster for the running of Recital applications on Redhat/Centos 5.3 although the general configuration should work for other linux versions with a few minor changes.
auth sufficient pam_krb5.so try_first_pass
auth sufficient pam_unix.so shadow nullok try_first_pass
account required pam_unix.so broken_shadow
account [default=bad success=ok user_unknown=ignore] pam_krb5.so
There is a good article on the gluster website here which gives some good information regarding file system optimization suitable for a HA Recital cluster solution.
I am pleased to finally report that the Centos release of Redhats 5.3 has been built and is available for download from http://www.centos.org/
The highlights of this release can be found at the following URL: http://www.redhat.com
The main areas of interest in my opinion excluding critical secirty fixes are:
- Updated hardwaresupport support for the new Intel Core i7 (Nehalem) chips
- Beefed up virtualiseation support increasing CPU and Ram limits of Virtual machines.
- Inclusion of the fully open sourced OpenJDK. This makes Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 the first enterprise-ready solution with a fully open source Java stack when combined with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.
For those who already have Centos 5.2 installed you can simply receive the update via Yum.
Before you do the following, check that you do not have 3rd party repo's and the Centos-testing repo enabled.
You can display the currently enabled repo's using the following command.
$ yum repolist
Then as root at the prompt type:
$ yum update
When installing nomachine on redhat 5.3 64-bit be sure to:
- Make sure you have installed the 64-bit packages as the 32-bit ones will not work.
- add the hostname to /etc/hosts
- Check "Disable encryption of all traffic" (in configuration / advanced tab)
- add the hostname to /etc/hosts
- make sure the host IP is not specified as 127.0.0.1 line
- Uncheck "Disable encryption of all traffic" (in configuration / advanced tab)
lslk lists information about locks held on files with local inodes on systems running linux.
Install it with:
yum install lslk